La Nuit: Dining and Dancing @ Galvin at Windows

Places with a view often come to be defined by their view. That’s understandable, and thankfully the new wave of high rise restaurants tend not to be cynical cash-ins. Hutong, Duck & Waffle, Sushi Samba come to mind as excellent restaurants 30 or 40 floors up. I’d probably add Galvin at Windows—the Michelin-starred restaurant 28 floors above Park Lane in the London Hilton—to that if I’d eaten there, but I had the bar food instead!

The bar has plush seats and booths with huge, sweeping views of West and Southwest London—a view you won’t get from the City or London Bridge—and they offer a wide range of cocktails, wine and beers. The cocktails were standard expensive location cocktails price, whereas the beers were surprisingly expensive, with some over £10. Fair enough, I guess; you’re paying for the view.

The food was pretty decent. The Korean fried chicken was crispy despite a thick tomato-ginger sauce dousing, and contained tender and juicy pieces of leg meat. The burger was dense, medium cooked with a bit of pinkness, and had some flavour, though they should have used crispy streaky bacon and not chewy back bacon.

The hot dog was more a sausage than a hot dog—OK but not really what you were looking for. It came with strangely one-dimensional mustard and completely flavourless (though texturally pleasant) fried onions. The doughnuts for dessert were like very good jam or custard doughnuts you buy in a shop—clearly they’d just seconds ago been deep-fried for us.

I was there because of La Nuit, the return of “sky-high dancing, dirty burgers and cool cocktails with XOMAN and his DJ collective”. The bar will presumably be turned into an ersatz club, which would be rather cool with such a stunning view of this side of London. If you do go along, don’t worry about going on an empty stomach—just get some of that tasty Korean chicken.

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